Ken Buck has constantly struggled between what he loves and what he wants to be.

To anyone who has spent any time with Buck, it’s obvious what he likes: Dirty cowboy boots. The great outdoors. Being out on a ranch. Fishing. Coaching football. Independence.

But the GOP Senate candidate’s driving ambition to be successful, to work on important projects and to embed himself with people who could help him down the road has often been at odds with that lifestyle.

He arrived in Colorado to work at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in 1990 — the last move in a string of zigzags between the Rockies and the East Coast that has defined the GOP Republican Senate candidate’s life since he was 12 years old.

Buck’s father worked as general counsel for Westinghouse in Manhattan and, straight out of the show “Mad Men,” Buck attended public school in Ossining, N.Y., in the 1960s.

But, since he was a boy, Buck says, he has felt a Western tug, to “the wide open space where it was quiet and you could go shoot a gun when you wanted to shoot a gun and ride a horse when you wanted to ride a horse.”

He doesn’t like to say he was “raised” in New York, though he was born there to two lawyers.

From age 12, Buck spent his summers working on his aunt and uncle’s ranch in La Grange, Wyo., helping with the cattle and corn and potato harvest.

He headed to Princeton University at 18.

“It’s interesting you say being born and raised in New York,” he said, talking about his background. “During the school year I was raised there, but during the summer, if there was raising, I was raised here (in Wyoming.)”

After graduating from Princeton in 1981, he tried out as a punter with the New York Giants, “and that went very quick,” he said, laughing.

A few months later Buck packed his parents’ furniture and moved them to Greeley. He found a job in Cheyenne at the state’s legislative services office and worked there for a year before starting law school at the University of Wyoming.

Back then, he was known as a “moderate kind of easygoing guy,” said Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat who practiced law in the area at the time.

U.S. Rep. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., a law school classmate, said Buck was not a “knee-jerk conservative.”

She said he kept things light while they commuted together to bar exam study sessions.

“Sometimes he makes jokes that would lead you to believe he’s more conservative,” Lummis said. “But his real focus is on being very pragmatic.”

Freudenthal said Buck always seemed politically ambitious.

“I saw him as kind of wandering around here,” he said. “But he had ambitions.”

After passing the Wyoming bar, Buck worked at a small Cheyenne firm for less than a year before taking a job with then-congressman Dick Cheney to work on the committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair. The two had met at various Wyoming Republican events while Buck was still in law school.

Taking that job required a move to Washington, D.C.

He described working on the investigation — a congressional probe into whether President Ronald Reagan authorized illegal arms sales to Iran to free hostages — as “a thrill.”

“It was a really fascinating view of American politics,” he said. “It was what it was all about.”

The report Buck helped author found Reagan made judgment mistakes with the Iran-Contra affair, but that there was “no constitutional crisis, no systemic disrespect for the rule of law, no grand conspiracy.”

Buck didn’t return to Wyoming, instead taking a job as a federal prosecutor for the Department of Justice.

He described that job — traveling around the country prosecuting federal criminal cases — as glamorous.

“I tried a case in L.A., and there were these big magnificent marble courtrooms,” he said. “Both jobs were really good jobs.”

Coincidentally, Michael Norton — the husband of his primary opponent Jane Norton — hired him in 1990 to work at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Denver.

Buck lived in the metro area for a few years until he divorced his first wife, Dayna, in 1994. He eventually moved to Greeley and remarried.

Buck kept in loose touch with Cheney and tried to get another job with him in 2002, when Cheney was vice president.

The offer was rescinded when Cheney’s office learned about the details surrounding Buck’s departure from the U.S. Attorney’s Office — he was officially rebuked for bad-mouthing a felony gun case to defense attorneys.

So Buck took a job with Hensel Phelps Construction doing special projects in early 2002.

Buck left to run for Weld County district attorney, an office he won in 2004.

He told Republican insiders early last year, as he was considering running for the U.S. Senate, that Hensel Phelps chief executive Jerry Morgensen would give him at least $1 million to help his campaign. To the same people, he also mentioned Cheney’s name as a possible big-dollar contributor.

In Buck’s primary, more than $2 million was spent on his behalf from outside groups that don’t have to disclose donors.

In an earlier interview, Buck said that he never discussed independent expenditures and that he hasn’t talked to Morgensen “for a long time.”

Morgensen has maxed out at $4,800 in contributions to Buck’s campaign. Cheney was not a Buck contributor in the last report filed before the primary election.

Morgensen doesn’t talk to the media, and Buck doesn’t talk much about their friendship or how Morgensen shaped him as a politician.

To Buck, who has campaigned on Senate term limits and said he’d only like to serve two terms, choosing to live in the West means “a very existence that doesn’t have any burdens to it.”

He and his wife have a little land outside of Greeley with horses. They like to take trips to the mountains and walk around, but he doesn’t like to call it “hiking.”

On the campaign trail, he has called Washington, D.C., a “foreign country.”

“I just love the West. You can go up to the mountains and be by yourself,” Buck said. “You can feel like there is just nobody around.”

Ken Buck

Age: 51

High School: Ossining High School, Ossining, N.Y., 1977

College: Princeton University, 1981

Law School: University of Wyoming, 1985

Key Jobs: Staffed the congressional committee probing the Iran-Contra affair under then-Wyoming congressman Dick Cheney; worked as a federal prosecutor at the Department of Justice and at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Denver. He worked on special projects for Hensel Phelps Construction and has been Weld County district attorney since 2005.

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